The invention relates to a connector assembly for interconnecting optical and/or electrical conductors.
In view of the ever increasing requirements made in information and telecommunication systems with respect to for example bandwidth and speed of the components used, printed circuit boards are designed recently, in which discrete optical and/or electrical conductors are embedded to obtain connections of high quality. In order to realize connections with such conductors, contact pads of these conductors are made in one plane with the surface of the printed circuit board. Such a contact pad can be obtained for example by bringing a conductor, for example an optical fibre, at least partially out of the surface of the printed circuit board and to remove the projecting part by polishing.
In order to obtain a reliable connection, it is of great importance that the contact pads of the conductors to be interconnected are placed one upon the other with high accuracy. For this purpose it is known to embed a guiding plate in a printed circuit board, which guiding plate has guiding channels in a main surface, said channels gradually ending in this main surface. The conductors are placed in these guiding channels, wherein the projecting ends of the conductors are polished in one plane with the main surface of the printed circuit board. A corresponding guiding plate with conductors for example coming from another printed circuit board or from a conductor cable, is placed upon the first printed circuit board in such a manner that the contact pads of the conductors contact each other. As the diameter of for example optical fibres is only 100-150 microns, in particular the positioning of the guiding plates transverse to the longitudinal direction of the fibres should occur with high accuracy to obtain a reliable connection.
For this purpose it is known to bore two holes one on each side of the guiding channels in the guiding plate embedded in the printed circuit board and to mount pins in these holes after polishing the projecting parts of the conductors, which pins should be received in corresponding holes of the other guiding plate. A disadvantage of this known solution is that realizing the required accuracy is very difficult.